The Sideswipe Lectures, Part Trois
by Vivienne Grainger
Summary: Sideswipe is far more creative than is really good for him.  Rated T for various mentions of the things grownups get up to.


The "20 Truths" concept is one introduced to me by Lady Bad Luck. It lets loose one's absolute worst impulses, with no constraints imposed by plot or dialogue.

1

Sideswipe has a formidable reputation, entirely deserved, as a practical joker.

2

In his career as jokester/nemesis/pain in the aft, he has found uses for many substances, among them peanut butter, paint stripper, guava jelly, Thousand Island salad dressing, and bleu cheese.

3

As Sunstreaker was involved in the bleu-cheese prank, it wasn't your made-in-America bleu-cheese _food_, no it wasn't. It was the $27.99/pound import, from France, aged in the caves that now smell slightly of soured milk all the time after a millenium or so of cheesing within, and which host the lovely little bacterium that creates the bleu (sorry, _blue_) veins in bleu cheese (not to be confused with the blue veins in your grandmother's legs).

4

Peanut butter? The grind-it-yourself kind from _fresh_ local nuts in the South, no salt, no sugar (sugar's bad for your engine). Sides figured, why the heck not?

5

Shockwave probably didn't care though, as peanut butter was smeared thickly all over the outside of his single optic, and bleu cheese applied to its inner surface, while he was a prisoner/patient unconscious after surgery (see also "Ratchet," items 16-18),

6

all of Perceptor's tool handles/adjustment wheels were lightly coated with peanut butter,

7

as was Wheeljack's lab, which for an entire week was blissfully free of explosion; he is still trying to figure that one out, and is happily unaware of peanut butter's fulminatory (slowly exploding) characteristcs. The next week, all those experiments went up at once with an enormous and sticky bang; and

8

Bumblebee, who was napping in the college parking lot when a thin strip of PB was placed on the dash side of his steering wheel.

9

Although come to think of it, perhaps that last one should land in Sam's column. Along with:

10

The Thousand Island dressing inserted painstakingly into every single container of liquid makeup Mikaela owned;

11

the guava jelly which replaced the contents of a mustard bottle, and which made a hot dog taste … very odd ….

12

There was also salad dressing which was pureed and put into a hand-sanitizer dispenser in Sam's dorm room, with the quite logical conclusion that Sideswipe is banned from any housing in which Sam takes up residence _forever_, although this took place after

13

guava jelly replaced all of the ink in every one of Sam's pens.

14

Sweetest notes he'd ever taken for all his classes. Ants loved Sam for a week.

15

Uncles seemed to have no reaction.

16

Ratchet once spent many hours trying to figure out why a test tube of guava jelly labeled "Sideswipe" gave him such odd readings for a sample of energon.

17

When he found that Sideswipe had liquified peanut butter by using microwaves, and poured the resultant goo into drawers holding Ratchet's favorite collection of porn, AKA "free garage and dealership calendars featuring cars," the medic was Less Than Amused, by at least several light-years.

18

The reason he keeps the heaviest wrenches for Sideswipe, however, was the day when Sides found the medic suffering from a muscle spasm, and, just before he was due to go out on a picnic with Mikaela and Sam, gave him a lovely backrub with the combination of guava jelly and peanut butter. Ratchet's still got the formic-acid scars.

19

Paint stripper? On a mission to the _Nemesis_, Sideswipe cross-connected the two pipes which directed water into the Decepticons' washracks, and the cooling system for the base. Megatron was vastly Less Than Amused; first he had to get an entirely new paint job, and next, Soundwave was not quite in time to prevent the entire cooling system from going up in flames. As these were immediately extinguished by seawater gushing in through the blown-out wall of Soundwave's own quarters, that wasn't quite as bad as it might have been.

20

Sideswipe has many uses for paint stripper. He also prefers to play his tricks on Prowl, and not on Optimus; it isn't that he respects one less than the other, but one's, you know, the _Prime_. Sides is a traditional 'bot at heart.

Usually, the 2IC refrains from vengeance of any sort, hoping against hope that the red 'bot will one day _grow up_. Once, however, Sideswipe earned three decacycles in the brig: he'd given Jazz a tube of what Sideswipe called "a really nice 'facing lubricant," some time prior to the date Jazz and Prowl had set for going public with their relationship.

The time interval between prank and public announcement had to be shortened considerably: Sideswipe had filled the tube with guava jelly and paint stripper.

The matching paint-free crotch patches the two shared meant that Optimus totally failed to get through the day's senior staff meeting without giggling. Twice.


End file.
